[a series I have been working on]
[part one can be found here]
I wonder--did those strange scents jar
your memories and dreams toward
unseen collisions with silence,
that wrong kind of quiet made dense
with soft specific sounds that spell
a place far deeper than our well-
used alphabet of ancient objects?
Our limbic world just disconnects
over time. Our temporal selves
get disheveled. Cerebral shelves
do not suffice any more. We
strive to hold things in place, but see
only place-holders and when age
eats worlds, the words fall off the page.
Like this:
Like Loading...
Related
A Prayer Like Gravity 
When age eats worlds….perfect
LikeLike
Thanks Audra. I debated for quite a while about switching “worlds” with “words”. Ended up here…
LikeLike
Yes, your choice feels right. Stunning.
LikeLike
Thank you Jilanne–
LikeLike
I like what you are working on here -we might call this “boundary work” though you expressed it so aptly when you said “living on the cusp of meaning.”
I think of age as cuspidal. I sometimes think we lose the vocabularies of youth and gain the vocabularies of experience -but words do get lost in between.
LikeLike
Oooh! I Love “boundary work”!! That’s perfect!
And I love “cuspidal”–what a great word.
And I agree about vocabualries, though I think it’s rather relative. It is perhaps a scale and any one of us can find ourselves at a congruent point on the scale with some-one of quite a different age–this is what good teachers do, I think, in the arts anyway. But there is a lot to be said for experience. for sure.
This one–well, the whole series–is about my father’s last years and his dementia, his “going beyond the cusp” perhaps, he crossed over that cusp of meaning, while I am still on this side of it, searching for the right questions to ask…
LikeLike
” and when age
eats worlds, the words fall off the page”
wow. this is a killer!! i can’t get enough of that ending – LOVE it! can’t wait to read more of this beautiful series… hats off to you, sir; always a pleasure to come visit and be swept away.
LikeLike
Thanks Miri–I struggled for a while–not able to decide whether “worlds” and “words” should be switched.
I am gratified that you like it this way.
More to come…
LikeLike
… like a walk in the early morning mist of Ashdown Forest with the heather mauving and the ditches turning from lemon to olive
LikeLike
…these woods…are haunted…with memory…and now color…thank you.
LikeLike
This is a haunting piece. Keep writing and haunting. 😉
LikeLike
Thank you Alice. I certainly will try. These have not always been emotionally “easy” to write, but they do seem to necessarily come together on their own, if you know what I mean.
Thank you for your words.
LikeLike
I understand “not always emotionally easy to write”. Weeping and writing at the same time happens here. Stand back and give me a hanky. I need a drip guard for the laptop. (not right now). ;-))
LikeLike
Pingback: Missing (Part 3) | A Prayer Like Gravity